YOUR AUDIENCE

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, or what your message is. The inevitable adage that you’ll encounter and have to be familiar with will always be “know your audience.” It’s part and parcel of effective customer management.

Knowing who is the target of your text, be it in marketing, public relations, or advertising, is crucial. Every campaign relies first on having a clear target audience, regardless of the scale of said campaign, from personalised emails to massive billboard ads.

This aspect is so important, it’s commonly the first concern when a new piece of content is produced: who is the target audience? Knowing who they are, what their needs and wants are, and more importantly: how you can turn those desires into something mutually beneficial by marketing your services. But is it enough? Is it enough to know your audience without understanding them? Here we will discuss how important it is not only to know your audience, but how important it is to understand them on a deeper level as well, and how in the post-cookie, zero-party data world, you can help achieve such an understanding.

So why is understanding more important than merely knowing, and what’s the difference? Well, suppose
you’re selling women’s footwear, and you know for a fact that your main demographic is women in their late 20s to early 30s.
Here’s the problem: even in that very small demographic, no one is going to like the same thing.
Understanding your audience on a deeper level means you can tailor products and content to their needs,
and provide highly personalised service to ensure that even within your target demographic, everyone
gets a highly unique customer experience.

The world of marketing is rapidly changing, and even now is readjusting to the demise of cookies and the
rise of gamification and zero-party data. Competition has never been more intense, and every marginal
gain is vital.

With that in mind, the difference between knowing and understanding should be seen as a make-or-break difference in this field, and it is exactly that difference that will determine customer loyalty and prevent them from going over to the competition.
Now make no mistake – you have to do both. You can’t understand your audience without knowing them first beforehand. They are merely different stages of customer knowledge. The issue here is that most will master knowing, but never progress to true understanding, leaving the true potential of your customer base largely wasted.
Understanding your audience means asking real important questions. What are they looking for? What are the problems that they need to solve? What are they looking for? Last but not least: how can you provide for all of this?

Why is a Real-time audience so important today?

It wasn’t too long ago that online shopping and marketing were labelled as cutting-edge, efficient, fast and convenient. Today, technology continues to push the envelope, taking online businesses across new ground at an even more rapid pace.
If online shopping supplanted mail-order marketing, cutting down wait times from weeks to a matter of days, the advent of real-time technology such as social media effectively cuts wait times from days to hours, or even less.
Marketers now have the opportunity to engage with customers in real-time, creating brand awareness, loyalty like never before, with the inevitable by-product of such a bond between brand and customer raising sales and profits.
Social media can thus serve as a vital instrument to promote your brand, and once you understand your audience, you will be able to broadcast exactly what your audience wants to hear, all at the rapid pace of real-time.

Having your hand on the pulse at every possible moment, and having the ability to monitor your audience in real-time as they talk about your brand is an immensely powerful tool, and represents the future of forward-thinking strategies in the field of marketing.

With real-time data collection being the new standard, with information being stored from the customer’s first visit, the data can be analysed and actionable content produced in a matter of hours or less. This personalised content can only result in one thing – greater audience engagement, translating to brand loyalty and increased revenue.
While conventional marketing still has its place, real-time marketing in which you engage with your audience on an immediate basis provides an excellent foil between long-term and short-term approaches to your marketing strategy.
Immediate engagement with customers however, requires immediate and accurate data gathering and analysis. Staying ahead of the pack has never been this easy or this intensive.

Prompt Technology
That’s where we come in. Knowing your audience is good, and understanding them is better – but both are pointless without the means to use that information – you will need it in real-time and you will need reliably accurate knowledge of your audience to feed your customer engagement strategy. It’s a virtuous circle and Prompt Technology is the tool you will need to create it.

We here at Sport Insights Media provide digital customer intelligence, revolutionising the way brands know their audience. With Prompt Technology, we provide a mutually beneficial way for brands to capture reliable insight about their customers.

With our Prompt Technology in your corner, your brand can fully maximise all hitherto untapped insight on your customers, all in real-time. With Prompt Technology, you can say goodbye to inefficient third-party data derived from external sources, relying instead on what your brand and your fan base share willingly as part of the zero-party data quizzes and games they’re playing.

This reach, which we call ‘open insight’, is unobtrusive, reliable, and most important of all – accurate. Using our Prompt Technology, customers are able to willingly share their views and opinions about brands and products which becomes the game-changing insight for many of our client’s strategies.

‘Zero-party data’ provides genuine customer insight without the need for any interpretation or inference, while providing a transparent approach to collecting data that will not only galvanise the data and strategies of your marketing campaigns but also ensure customer brand loyalty as you act on your customer’s submitted data to provide them with a unique, personalised experience.

With Prompt Technology, your brand will be able to understand your audience’s motivations, opinions and unmet needs, enabling you to carry out key business decisions with reliable accuracy and ensure that you make the most of your resources while staying ahead of the curve.

Benefits to understanding your audience

To achieve critical mass, to become a brand of truly unassailable global appeal is something that all marketers crave, but as we’ve outlined in this article, reaching a specific target audience can be a challenge in itself.
Understanding your audience is not only essential for your brand and product, it’s a matter of life and death. But what exactly are the benefits of having such an insight into your audience and how they interact with your business?
First and foremost – customer retention. Anyone can sell a product, but if you can keep a customer coming back for more, that’s when your brand is on the path to greatness. Understanding your audience and converting their data into effective strategies not only shows that you’re capable of understanding your audience, but it also shows that you are capable to resonate with them on a personal level. Such trust and understanding translate to brand loyalty.
The second one should be obvious – financial advantage. Advertising campaigns not only make or break brands, they can also be extremely expensive. An unsuccessful one be fatal for a brand, but with the combined use of data technology and user insight and understanding, the risks of marketing campaigns can be limited, minimising cost and maximising profit by not only delivering one’s strategy to the correct group of potential customers, but accurate audience analysis provides a varied and unique enough experience that resonates with users on a personal level.
Third, but no less important – opportunity. Not only does understanding your audience allow you to
create a unique tailor-made experience for all of them, you will be able to reliably predict what they would
want next with sound data-backed insights.

Real-time interactions with your customers will allow you to anticipate their wants and needs and head
off problems before they become one. User reviews, social media responses, and gamified quizzes, all keep
your customers engaged with your brand, but more importantly, keep your brand engaged and alert for
new opportunities.